The value of analytics, made easy

Part of the issue lies with the leadership of the analytics team. Recently, I had a conversation with a group of subject matter experts, a project sponsor, and the analytics team members. The analytics team presented initial results from a test that was underway, they explained that we had seen positive and negative operating results from the test. I asked the team as a whole to highlight and extract the effects of the test into the following elemental components – naturally occurring business results; results from known, yet unrelated, operational changes; and results from external events (i.e. competitive activity, natural disasters, man-made or market changes) and from the tests that we designed and inserted into the operational mix. The people who fought the hardest against the request or directive to take the results down to the next level were the data scientists. The analytics team argued that there were no compelling reasons to tease...